Mobile robots are often proposed as a favorable substitute to human correspondence in emergency response, disaster relief, and environmental monitoring scenarios. In this work, the next iteration of the Aquapod is proposed as a method to facilitate collection of subsurface liquid samples in order to assess toxicity levels in a body of water. This amphibious small form-factor robot is equipped with a buoyancy control unit, detachable fluidic sampling unit, and a wide range of sensing and processing capabilities. The robot was designed to move and collect water samples to a maximum depth of ten meters. Its unique form of tumbling locomotion results in a versatile platform that can be used in both terrestrial and aquatic environments leveraging its high mobility-to-size ratio.

Effective robotic autonomy requires an accurate estimation of the remaining power that the robot is carrying. There are a number of methods to estimate the remaining capacity of the robot's batteries. The accuracy of these approaches varies depending upon the chemical composition of the batteries as well as the means by which the monitoring is conducted. In this paper, an overview of various battery capacity estimation methodologies will be presented as well as a discussion of a specific implementation utilized on robotic platforms developed at the Center for Distributed Robotics at the University of Minnesota. This approach involves the novel use of fuel-gauging electronics for mobile robotic platforms. Experiments were conducted to show the accuracy of this method for both charge and discharge of the polymer Lithium-ion batteries in use.

Within the fields of law enforcement and urban search and rescue, there is always a need to obtain information from areas that may be hard to reach or unsafe to enter. One method of obtaining this reconnaissance information is to deploy a robot as a projectile. This may be accomplished with mechanical aids or simply by throwing the robot manually. This rapid deployment method has the ability to attain locations inaccessible to other technologies. The miniature nature of the presented design has the ability to operate discretely and avoid detection, making it desirable for law enforcement. In the case of urban search and rescue, the diminutive form minimizes the impact on potentially unsound structures. During the course of deployment, unexpected impacts and drops are inevitable, generating a need for an impact invariant design. Design decisions to create this system are presented, and experimental validation of design aspects is discussed

The Scout is a miniature robot capable of performing surveillance and reconnaissance applications. However, the small size of the Scout limits the on-board processing capability and thus requires that the primary sensing modality (vision) be processed remotely. This creates a dependence upon a video channel which can become a severe bottleneck when attempting to use large numbers of robots. This paper discusses the newest generation of the Scout, the COTS 3.0, which attempts to reduce the effect of the communication bottleneck by using more local sensing capabilities to achieve a degree of autonomous functionality. Several experiments showing the durability of the new COTS Scout and the autonomous capability are presented.